Avalon City Saints: Chapter 7
7: Natarani - Stepping Outside
“It’s not me!” said Connie.
“How can you be sure?” said Natarani. “You’ve been infected with a mind parasite. Who knows how many different personalities it may have concocted for you.”
“You don’t really think that, do you!?” said Connie, the panic creeping back into her voice. Natarani paused for a moment and considered. It did not really make much sense that the sprite would bring Connie to her, with all its prophecies and portents, and then lie about a some thing as trivial as this.
“No,” said Natarani, “I don’t think so. Forget I said that. I need to find this guy though.”
Having accepted that Connie had nothing to do with the ‘Johnny Ballistic’ account, Natarani started to search the internet for the real culprit. With a bit of digging, she found that Johnny Ballistic was an online streamer, who had started out as just a costumed prankster, but had somehow, more recently got himself modified.
Now his activities revolved around stopping petty crime and antisocial behavior with a jet pack and a non-lethal arsenal of tech weapons. The image of the graffiti mandala, which matched the other mandala on the dark website was just a coincidence, and a coincidence, in Natarani’s experience, was too often a sign that higher dimensional forces were at play.
Before she had even properly considered the implications of what she was doing, Natarani had composed and sent a DM to Johnny Ballistic. It was an innocuous enough sentence, enquiring as to the location of the graffiti image. Having her Destroyer aspect brought to the fore sometimes meant that Natarani’s sense of caution could be swept aside by the momentum of the hunt.
As soon as she had hit ‘send’, she sensed her mistake.
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Her skin prickled. There was a palpable shift in the æther. Natarani could sense a vast absence extending towards the room from an abstruse angle. A fissure was slowly opening into an abstract dimension. The tapestries on the walls billowed - the arcane symbols that were woven into the fabric took the brunt of the encroaching reality distortions. The mundane world creaked at the seams.
“Ah,” said Nararani. “That is… not ideal.”
Connie could sense something too, her eyes flicked back and forth. "What's happening?" she whispered. The walls creaked ominously, as a sickly, pale-orange glow seeped between the patterns on the skylight. “I probably shouldn’t have sent that message,” said Natarani.
“How can an email cause this?” said Connie.
“That mandala thing is some kind of symbolic, incursive device,” said Natarani. “A DM is a symbolic pathway that projects intent. But it works both ways.”
“What?” said Connie.
“A pathway has opened,” said Natarani.
“From where?” said Connie.
Natarani shrugged. It was clear to her that space beyond the office walls was disintegrating. The room’s layers of apotropaic defences were holding their integrity. The room’s defences had saved them from being torn to pieces. Instead, it was collapsing into an adjacent reality. Sending unsolicited DMs was often ill-advised, thought Natarani. Although they rarely lead to such a catastrophic degradation of the mundane world.
"Try not to panic," said Natarani, taking Connie by both hands. She gently folded the old woman's index fingers under her thumbs. "This gesture called the vayu mudra. It should help. Take some slow, deep breaths." She demonstrated, inhaling through her nose, nodding to Connie to do the same. The Augur did as she was instructed, taking long, slow, focussed breaths.
Subscibe to The Hypolloi"Now, listen," said Natarani. "We appear to have inadvertently opened a gateway into another dimension..."
“We?” said the old woman as she began to hyperventilate.
“Connie!” said Natarani, guiding the Auger back to her slow, deep breathing pattern. "We are completely protected, inside this room. The mandala thing, whatever it is - more of an anti-mandala if anything. We seem to have activated it.”
“We?” said Connie.
“You brought this to my attention,in the first place!” said Natarani. “I would be teaching my yoga class right now, if you hadn’t turned up!”
“I’m sorry,” said Connie.
“Never mind,” said Natarani. “The situation is that we have been drawn into another plain of existence. Another reality. We’re lucky. This room has safeguards against just this kind of attack. Depending on where we are, I should be able function outside as normal. I have plenty of experience of some very unusual environments. However, I believe that you and your passenger would find it very… uncomfortable in this place. Whilst I am outside..."
"Wait!?” Connie gasped. “You're leaving me?"
"For a short while," said Natarani. "You will be quite safe in here." She began to change out of her yoga clothes. “What if you don’t come back?!” shrieked the Auger. But Natarani ignored her.
It was time to go to work.
Natarani’s work clothes consisted of an iridescent, tiger print choli and matching leggings. Both were woven from the pelt of a neoplasticist weretiger that she had destroyed, early in her career. The fabric was interlaced with alchemical gold-thread which helped to boost her natural defensive aura. Natarani’s steel arm-bracers were plated with the same gold, which imbued the alloy with esoteric defences, whilst also providing protection from more mundane attacks.
Now fully on display was her elaborate snake tattoo, that coiled itself along the length of her left arm. It had been etched by a Naga tattooist, using pigments blended from the ink of a Martian Calamari Queen. It heightened Natarani’s defenses against symbolic attack.
She smeared black kohl across her eyes, then carefully drew the tripundra - three white, horizontal stripes and a red dot – on her forehead. With her war-paint ritual complete, she turned to the ornate, metal cabinet, bolted to the wall, to retrieve her sacred weapon.
Placing her hand onto the electronic palm reader, the cabinet's door unlocked itself with a clank.
From inside, she retrieved the two sections of her trishula. She had had the trident custom made by a master bladesmith, whom she had found on the internet. Conveniently, he had turned out to live a fifteen minute bus ride away from her house, on outskirts of Avalon City. Steve, the bladesmith, combined both modern and classical methods to his craft. The trishula's telescopic shaft was composed of carbon fibre. The collapsible three-pronged head was a gold-plated steel alloy.
Natarani had stopped routinely carrying her trishula on the insistence of the Avalon City Police. She had to concede their point. It was, after all, an offensive weapon. She now only used it in the most dire situations and the most dangerous environments.
With a swift, clockwise twist, the spring-loaded shaft extended and Natarani slotted the head into place. The three blades clicked, fanned out and locked with a reassuring, metallic ping.
"I promise I won't be too long," said Natarani. "Just a quick scout around. See what's what and then I'll come straight back. OK?"
“There must be another way!” said Connie.
“I wish there were,” said Natarani. “You will be completely safe in here, I promise you.”
"I just feel so useless," said Connie. “Sitting here, doing nothing, while you’re out there facing god knows what!” Natarani put her hand on Connie’s shoulder and smiled. The old woman’s cowardly, sprite passenger seemed to have ducked back into her subconscious for time being.
“I assure you, Connie,” said Natarani. “‘God knows what’ has more to fear from me, than I do from it! I will be back before you know it. I will find us a way out of here and then we shall return home.”
Connie returned a weak smile and nodded.
"Right then," said Natarani. It was time for her to get into character. "Get ready to open the door, Connie. I suggest that you don't look through the door when it opens. In fact, it's probably best if you close your eyes as you open it. I'll jump through, then you slam it shut, as quickly as you can, and then lock it behind me, yes?"
The old woman nodded.
"OK," said Natarani. She took a breath and calmed her thoughts. She counted to three.
"Go!"
The door swung open. Natarani sprung through.
Immediately, she finds that, on the other side of the door the laws of nature have been rescinded. Tumbling head over heels into the swirling nowhere, her heightened senses whirl, as they are flooded with conflicting information. She fights to recalibrate herself. Light and form and shape collapse. Time seems optional. She is dimly aware of the door slamming behind her. Something about the banality of the sound is enough for Natarani's subconscious to roughly triangulate her position, relative to the alien environment.
She spins, pirouettes and rolls through an axis not available in the mundane world. Her senses reset and extend. Several of her spare senses activate. Her bare feet hit gravel. Momentum carries her into a controlled skid. Natarani is sliding down a steep incline. She drives her trishula hard into the loose ground, in a bid to slow her descent. She stops short, with a sharp intake of breath, at the edge of a yawning precipice.
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Slowly adjusting to the environment, she takes a moment and glances around. The air is abnormally still and deeply cold. But the chill is more existential than anything to do with the physical temperature. It is an ancient, abstract place.
The brass-coloured sky is something that she had come to associate with the asymmetric realms; a malignant reality, running like abandoned, Victorian sewers beneath the everyday world of Avalon City. The very atmosphere fights to repel human existence.
But, Natarani is slightly more than human. She feels a rush as her aura realigns itself with the laws of this hostile dimension. Peering over the edge of the precipice, she smiles as she recalls Nietzsche's famous observation, regarding the dangers of fighting monsters; 'When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.' This fact suits Natarani just fine at that very moment.
Something is rising up the cliff face. Something for her to destroy.
A swarm of souleeches are rolling towards her, like a wild and turbulent thundercloud. Flashes of green energy spit out from their writhing mass. They are hunting. Souleeches use a grotesque form of echo-location to hone in on their prey. They have caught Natarani's scent, and are now moving in for the kill.
Natarani, the Destroyer, now fully at home within the evil æther of the asymmetric realms, is only too happy to oblige. As the souleeches' acidic stench hits her nostrils, she bares her teeth, uproots her trishula, and dives headlong into the abyss.
Chapter 8 in two weeks!
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Faction Paradox: Weapons Grade Snake Oil
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